Abstract

Footnotes (297)

Using the URL or DOI link below will
ensure access to this page indefinitely

Based on your IP address, your paper is being delivered by:

New York, USA

Processing request.

Illinois, USA

Processing request.

Brussels, Belgium

Processing request.

Seoul, Korea

Processing request.

California, USA

Processing request.

If you have any problems downloading this paper,please click on another Download Location above, or view our FAQFile name: SSRN-id1133130. ; Size: 536K

You will receive a perfect bound, 8.5 x 11 inch, black and white printed copy of this PDF document with a glossy color cover. Currently shipping to U.S. addresses only. Your order will ship within 3 business days. For more details, view our FAQ.

Quantity:Total Price = $9.99 plus shipping (U.S. Only)

If you have any problems with this purchase, please contact us for assistance by email: Support@SSRN.com or by phone: 877-SSRNHelp (877 777 6435) in the United States, or +1 585 442 8170 outside of the United States. We are open Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:30AM and 6:00PM, United States Eastern.

Restoring Justice to Civil Rights Movement Activists?: New Historiography and the Long Civil Rights Era

This paper seeks to engage ongoing discussions and conceptualizations about the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project and its meanings, boundaries, and goals. It tells two different but overlapping stories of the civil rights era and argues that the dominant abbreviated story of the movement, focusing on the ten-year period centered on the King-led nonviolent movement in the South, should be rejected as a framework for the Project. This ten-year story truncates, decontextualizes, and tames the movement while rendering it legalistic, episodic, triumphant and nostalgic. The effect is that it obscures the movement's relevance to today's circumstances; it distorts the nature, objectives and activities of the masses of ordinary black people who fought its battles, including their broad egalitarian democratic agenda; and it allows forces hostile to the movement's objectives to easily appropriate and misappropriate its ideas. As such it undermines the goals of the Project, justice for civil rights activists. Based on new historiography, this paper advocates for an understanding of the civil rights period as constituting what Nikhil Pal Singh calls the long civil rights era, and part of what scholars such as Manning Marable and Clayborne Carson call the black freedom struggle. New historiography is beginning to expose the limitations of the truncated civil rights story and to provide a fuller picture of the era. For instance, it suggests that the civil rights era begins in the 1930s, is transformed in the 1950s, and again in the mid-1960s and ends but remains unfinished sometime around the early eighties with its broad egalitarian democratic agenda largely unmet.